There have been a lot of numbers thrown around in the last year about the power consumption of servers and data centers. For example, servers and their cooling are now said to consume more power than color TVs in the US.

To try and make a bit more sense out of the general information overflow, we here at Pingdom decided to put together some interesting facts and figures from different sources and add some calculations of our own to hopefully give a decently clear picture of the current situation.

How much power does ONE data center use?

• One large, 50,000 square feet data center consumes around five megawatt of power.
• Five megawatt is enough to power 5,000 houses.

Of course, there are data centers that use significantly more power. For example, Equinix is said to be building a data center with a server farm consuming up to 30 megawatts, which would be enough to power 30,000 houses.

How much power do all data centers consume in total?

• Servers (and their cooling) in US data centers use the equivalent of a full year’s output from five 1,000 megawatt power plants.
• That is as much power as the entire state of Mississippi.
• Or enough to power five million houses.

It should be mentioned that even though the above numbers seem large, some of the data above is based on numbers for 2005, and don’t include other equipment involved, such as network equipment. We have almost three years of explosive data center expansions to add to that, and things aren’t exactly slowing down.

How fast are data centers expanding?

• In 2003, there were 5.6 million servers used in US data centers.
• In 2007, there were 11.8 million.

That’s more than a 2x increase in the number of servers in just four years.

What does the future look like?

Companies like Google, Microsoft and many others are aggressively expanding their infrastructure. For example, Bill Gates recently stated that Microsoft will soon have “many millions of servers”.

Considering that cooling currently uses as much energy as actually powering the servers, there are great environmental and cost benefits to be gained from improving energy efficiency, and there is plenty of research being done in that department.

If energy efficiency could improve just 20 percent, that would be a power saving equivalent to the output from an entire 1,000 megawatt power plant. Or, to continue the house analogy, enough to power one million houses.

The numbers in this article are of course estimates, but it’s not hard to see why power consumption has become a major cost factor for data centers.

Sources:

Aside from the links above, we used information gathered from the following articles: Data Center Power Consumption: By the Numbers, Study: Data Center Power Usage Exploding, Is the Data Center Power Drain an Urban Myth?, Number of the Day: 11.8 Million.

As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

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